Politicians influence arrests and prosecutions of friends,
relatives and of course their campaign contributors. Illegal
influence is used to both free the guilty and jail the
innocent. Cops and prosecutors look the other
way. Whistle blowing in law enforcement circles doesn’t exist.
If you’re accused of doing something horrible, it doesn’t remove
your rights. That’s when such rights are most important. When government can
make the decision to kill you without the ability to stand trial or face their
accusers, its called tyranny. There will be some who say “Who cares? These guys
are terrorists?”, but who decides if you’re a criminal or terrorist?
No-knock raids help those in power control you. No-knock
raids are less about officer safety or preventing evidence from being lost and
more about making sure that “consumers” are too scared to resist the Police
State. Our government loves to use force and tells us it’s for our own good.
The numbers of police officers that are actually concerned about the well being
of the general public are declining because they’re being trained to see
everyone they come into contact with as a threat rather than a neighbor.
Constitutional protections, including the ban against
unreasonable searches and seizures, are ignored with the now ever-present use
of “no-knock” warrants. SWAT teams are now routinely used for regular police
work, including serving warrants for nonviolent offenses. Raids by SWAT teams,
typically carried out in the dead of night, often involve the use of military
stun grenades, the wanton destruction of property, killing household pets, and
increasingly, the deaths of “suspects” and their family members, including
children. More than one hundred such raids take place in America every
day.
The militarization of domestic policing is one symptom of a
deeply dysfunctional society. While the political establishment never loses the
opportunity to declare there’s no money for social needs; education, pensions,
health care, nutrition. Billions of dollars are made available to ensure the
police have the latest tools of violence.
America
looks like a garrison state. The border of the country has been turned into de
facto military zones, where constitutional rights don’t exist. Military drones
have already appeared in American skies, and plans are in place for their wider
use. There’s a determined effort to get you used to police and soldiers armed
to the teeth, at airports, train stations, schools, sports stadiums, etc.
Militarized police are part of a massive state apparatus
that operates largely outside of any legal or democratic supervision and
tramples on the population’s constitutional and democratic rights every day.
Domestic policing is increasingly integrated with the NSA spying programs that
monitor your movements, communications and intimate personal details. I know
you tell yourself about how vanilla you are obeying all laws, of which you are
aware, but perhaps you’ve noticed your rulers make mistakes.
The militarization of American society was graphically exposed
in the lockdown of Boston after the Marathon bombings, in which the city’s residents were
told to “shelter in place” as squads of police in combat fatigues, armed with
assault rifles, conducted house-to-house searches.
Americans don’t live in the real world and one day could
wake up stunned by reality. If a little boy points his finger and sys “Bang!”
he is handcuffed by the police and dragged from school, to be subjected to
psychiatry. This in the planet’s most militarily aggressive country, in which
said little boy is constantly exposed to war movies and murderous video games.
Dodge ball is violence, but join the Marines and be a man.
Government protects us from people who might spy on us, by
spying on us. They protect us from violent thugs with cops that perform
no-knock SWAT raids on peaceful people. They protect us from thieves and
financial collapse by stealing from us to give to the thieves. Now they’ve
declared war on Americans to protect us from those who might declare war on us.
It’s time to realize that government is the big terrorist.
Law enforcement is a “product” we’re forced to buy, and
severely punished through torture, or even by death if we refuse. Since law
enforcement operates as a monopoly, rather than through the market, there’s no
legitimate mechanism to guide rational distribution of resources, and no way to
measure “customer” satisfaction although using the term “customer” in this
context is a bit like using the term “girlfriend” to describe a rape victim.
The Nazis valued police competence, so in 1933, almost all
of the men who served in the various state police forces under the Weimar
Republic stayed on in their jobs. In one of the few places in Germany where
most of the Gestapo records survived, every member of the Gestapo was a career
policeman or had a police background. Most Gestapo men were not Nazis, but at
the same time weren’t opposed to the Nazi regime, which they were willing to
serve, in whatever task they were called upon to perform: 80% of all Gestapo
investigations were started in response to information provided by
denunciations by ordinary Germans.
Prosecutors are rewarded for winning at all costs. They have
no incentive to search for truth rather than a conviction, and they’re entirely
unaccountable when they pervert justice in pursuit of victory. Don’t believe
that your innocence is any protection. The question isn't whether you’ve done
anything wrong, but whether the criminal justice system is going to target you
and once you’re in that system, you face excessive odds of emerging from it without
damage.
Both judges and prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity for
their official conduct. They’re not personally liable for their official
misconduct, which means that they have no flesh over the fire. Judges, especially
those elected to their positions, are almost universally reluctant to force
prosecutors to carry out their duty under the Supreme Court’s ruling by
providing relevant evidence to the defense.
When our own government no longer sees us as human beings
with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for
data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at
heart, mistreated, and then jails us if we dare step out of line, punishes us
unjustly without remorse, and refuses to own up to its failings, we’re no
longer operating under a constitutional republic. What we/re experiencing is a
tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which operates against the
interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.
Having allowed government to expand and exceed our reach, we
find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country
and our lives. As long as we let them, government officials will continue to
trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of
the people. Yet government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. The
problem is that we’ve suspended our consciences in favor of the police state.
The choice before us is that of being a child or a parent,
of obeying blindly, never questioning the police state or challenging
injustice, standing up to tyranny, and owning up to our responsibilities as
citizens, no matter how painful, risky or uncomfortable.
Who can expect people to obey laws that the police refuse
to, and when that refusal reaches felony behavior that would land anyone else
in jail for decades there should be no surprise when those with few scruples, if
any, take advantage of the example they’re set by “law enforcement” to create
some mayhem of their own. Cops don’t get magical new powers because they have a
blue suit on. They’re only empowered to act and use force when a law
is being violated. Some believe that nobody is entitled to resist police
felonies and must put up with them, whether the crime involved is theft, felony
assault or even murder.
Always remember, cops worship the State. There’s nothing
they won’t do at its command. 9/11 is one of their favorite excuses. They will
trample all over the original intent of the constitution if the State tells
them that it’s okay. They will lie. They will twist facts. They will put
innocent citizens in jail, rather than lose face for their own misdeeds. They
will see nothing, hear nothing, and speak nothing, to protect their kind from
the very laws they have sworn to uphold. They would rather kill you on a
mistake and lie about it with the mindset that their number one priority is to
go home safe a night, even if that means an unjustified killing, then claim
that their life and safety required a split second guess and they were in fear
for their lives, from everyday items.
We no longer speak of peace officers or police departments.
They’ve come to be known as law enforcement officers and police forces, by
their own preference and usage. Given their tactics, equipment and behavior,
the police closely resemble the standing army we’ve rightly feared. Notice they
call us “civilians”. Police chose this path because, it creates a clear cut “us
and them” relationship with “consumers”, most visible in their routinely
botched and often fatal “no knock” home invasions.
The excuses are rarely convincing, as in all things, you are
what you do, not what you say. That sort of conduct by armed agents of the
State is characteristic of war zones where no rights are recognized, where the
preponderance of force is the one and only standard of ownership, where “you’re
either one of us or the enemy”. The law-abiding citizen also notices SWAT teams
weren’t deployed to take out the looters torching downtown businesses. Yet they’ll
do bomb-throwing midnight raids, guns blazing, often for what was once routine
process-serving, even when toddlers and other innocents are known to be in the
house.
Officers need the citizens; it’s not the other way around, and
you can’t get what you want through demands, but only through voluntary
cooperation.
Consider North
Korea, where the citizens wouldn’t dare to
think about organizing protests and demonstrations against governmental policy.
They’re considered by the authorities to be model citizens; deferential,
orderly, obedient, and loyal, never questioning or challenging in a public way
what the authorities are doing.
That’s the mindset of the cops in America. They want people to behave
like people do in the military or in North Korea; Deferential, obedient,
submissive, and loyal. That’s why cops bark out orders to people as if the cops
were drill sergeants. They expect people to obey them, just like privates do in
the military.
An unarmed black man is killed by police and automatically,
Americans assume, he must have done something to deserve being killed. 130
years after Twain’s masterpiece, Americans still live in a dream world. The
media pounce on factoids, did marijuana in Michael Brown’s system cause him to
behave erratically? I don’t know, does it make Willie Nelson act erratically?
If you’re poor in America, you don’t stand a chance,
if you’re poor and black that goes double. It’s not Black on Black crime; it’s
poor on poor crime. No one called the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, Italian on
Irish crime. It isn’t racially motivated; it’s economically and geographically
motivated crime. It’s seizing whatever opportunity is viable, to rise above
poverty in a society precluding legitimate social improvement.
A decade ago we were debating whether non-citizens like
“enemy combatants” being held at Guantanamo
Bay and Muslim-Americans
rounded up in the wake of 9/11, were entitled to protections under the
Constitution as they relate to indefinite detention. Americans weren’t overly
concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, and now we’re the ones in the
unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by “our
government”.
A sizeable portion of “consumers” aren’t concerned about
government spying on Americans, having been brainwashed into believing that if
you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. It will only
be a matter of time before they learn the hard way that in a police state, it
doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, eventually, you’ll
be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and
suspect.
Anyone who has been paying attention is aware that we have a
growing domestic terrorism problem here in America and I mean our militarized
police departments. The FBI defines domestic terrorism: “Domestic
terrorism” means activities with the following three characteristics: Involve
acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law; Appear intended
to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; Occur primarily within the
territorial jurisdiction of America.
Indeed, police officers kill more Americans every year
than terrorists do. We’re eight times more likely to be killed by a cop than by
a “terrorist.” Americans are being terrorized by those who were supposed to
protect us from terrorism.
Police like to pretend that their job is to “protect and
serve.” It isn’t. Their job is to forcibly control the rest of us in whatever
way politicians tell them to. Politicians make up commands; call them laws, and
their hired guns, “law enforcers”, hurt any who disobey. Police know this,
which is why you will often hear them say things like, “I don’t make the law, I
only enforce it,” with the implication being that they aren’t to blame, because
they’re just following orders and doing as they’re told.
That excuse was invalid when the Nazis used it, and it’s
invalid today. It’s also completely cowardly to deny responsibility for your
actions, just because someone else told you to do something. How do you suppose
the police would respond to some common thief saying,” don’t blame me for
mugging this old lady; someone else told me to”? They would respond exactly how
we should respond to it when they use the excuse: You’re responsible for what you
do.
The over-funded police in America tend to be a lethal clown
posse. The American police state has been a savage enterprise enforcing
unpopular or simply bad laws for decades. One determined man gunning for the
cops can paralyze an entire state’s law enforcement apparatus and have them
running for cover. With few exceptions, even the vaunted thousands of SWAT
teams, American police do not encounter talented armed resistance to their
predations. For every Dorner incident, there are thousands of Americans savaged
and mauled by the cops who offer no resistance whatsoever. Some of these
unfortunates go to the hospital for non-crimes like obstructing and resisting
arrest. The present vector of violence by the police state will increase and
they will start pushing the wrong folks the wrong way. More Americans don’t
feel consoled by the presence of police but frightened and concerned for their
well-being.
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